Updated Firmware Blobs Out For Intel Skylake & Broxton Linux Graphics

In case you missed it, earlier this year I reported on Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver to require binary-only firmware blobs beginning with Skylake and Broxton hardware.

That's indeed been the case and today there's been new firmware blobs merged into linux-firmware for Broxton and Skylake.

The firmware files were pushed into linux-firmware Git here and here. The reported updates though to the firmware files are quite small and appear to mostly come down to a few fixes.

Intel's open-source driver firmware situation is quite similar to the AMD stack with it also requiring firmware blobs in order to provide hardware acceleration. The Nouveau driver has turned in that direction too given changes to the Maxwell GPU with the GTX 900 GPUs, Tegra X1, and all future NVIDIA GPUs needing signed firmware files for hardware-accelerated support, which we're still waiting on NVIDIA to release these files to Nouveau developers.